


Belshazzar’s Eternal Rainbow

by infinite_regress



Series: Colours, Lights and Gardens [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Belshazzar’s Eternal Rainbow, Canon-Compliant, Character Analysis, Cold War, Contemplation, F/M, Gen, Into the Dalek, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, Romance, loss and longing, mention of Eleven, wistful-whoufaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 01:21:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6032929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinite_regress/pseuds/infinite_regress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A  rainbow that never alters, never changes, never fades: the perfect spot for Clara to reflect on her relationship with the Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Belshazzar’s Eternal Rainbow

“Clara, this really is the most delightful spot,” Ashildr said looking up at the rainbow arcing above them through an achingly blue sky. It was the biggest rainbow either one of them had ever seen, and filled a full third of the sky with sweeping swathes of colour, a merry dance of reds chasing oranges and yellows across the sky, sweeping through green into shades of blue and purple at a melancholy edge. Clara and Ashildr sat on a picnic blanket spread across springy cobalt blue grass and the air was clear and fresh like a pine forest after rain. 

“Why did you pick this place?” Ashildr asks, propped upright on the flats of her hands, legs stretched out in front of her. Clara shrugs. 

“Just thought it would be nice,” she was on her back, hands neatly folded over her chest looking up at the rainbow and the sky beyond. 

“You’re sad again,” Ashildr said. Clara still looked straight ahead, squinted a little, perhaps at the sun as it edged out from behind a wispy billowing cloud.

“I think a bit of me will always be sad,” she said still looking up, “but not all of me, not all of the time” she paused, drummed her fingers against her knuckle, wiggled her toes inside her Clarkes shoes, “why did you do it, Ashildr? Sell him out to the Time Lords?”  
How could anyone hope to understand it? It began in a Viking Village with a single domino: a Mire Chip, a sliver of good intentions from a passing magician. Click click, a line of dominoes trickled through the ages, doubled by heart break, spiralled by sorrow, re-doubled again by rejection and time marching dispassionately and relentlessly on and click click click, they are on a trap street in London with a million dominoes scattering the magician’s good intentions to hell. Ashildr plucked a handful of blue grass from the edge of the blanket, and rubbed it between her fingers, brought it to her nose. The smell was bitter, quite at odds with the freshness of the air and the cascade of colour overhead. 

“I’m not angry, I’m not bitter. I’d just like to know,” Clara added mildly. Ashildr crossed her legs one over another, and sighed.

“I thought I had no choice. I thought I was being clever. I thought I was paying him back for trapping me in a thousand lifetimes I didn’t ask for. Take your pick.” The two women continued to not look at each other; find the intricacies of the chasing colours, or the fall of the hillside, or the clouds dancing with the sun fascinating distractions, “I am sorry, Clara. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I didn’t think anyone would get hurt,” Ashildr offered at last. 

“Except him. You didn’t think the Time Lords were inviting him on some kind of Transcendental Retreat,” there was no ire in her words just irony as she opened the picnic basket and passed Ashildr the caritas bread.

“He made me,” Ashildr said taking the bread and breaking it in two pieces, “then he left me like a crumpled message in a bottle drifting in the ocean for a thousand years.” 

“Ashildr…” Clara said, she almost always called her Ashildr, ‘Lady Me’ was a name reserved in Clara’s mind for occasions when they needed to impress, ‘Ashildr’ Clara thought, located the human in her: she is completely Ashildr right now, “I’m sorry too” she said, accepted the bread passed back to her.

“What was it like, travelling with him?” Clara smiled and thought of him; the floppy bow-tie Doctor, flirting and whirling and showing off; her velvet Doctor, spikiness and soft-layers, not-hugging yet holding her close to his hearts; all of him, every lifetime she has been privileged to glimpse. 

“It was the most amazing and wonderful, and quite often bloody terrifying adventure any one could ever have. I’ve seen the most unbelievable things and been places most people only dream of,’ Clara sinks into her story, vivid pictures in her mind, sights, smells, sensations, a vivid living journal of a thousand and one places, “once we spent hours trapped on a nuclear submarine, with three hundred pounds of hell clanking around inside trying to kill us and start World War 3,” Ashildr raised a questioning eye brow. “Grand Marshall Skaldak. Vengeful Ice Warrior. We talked him round,” she explains, “and have I ever told you I’ve been inside a Dalek? Twice!” Ashildr stopped chewing, and stared at her, “once we went on a mission, we were both miniaturised, proper ‘inner space’ style, and injected,” she mimicked a plunger with her thumb, and shot an imaginary syringe into Ashildr’s leg, “right into a Dalek.” 

“That sounds stupid. Why would anyone agree to that?”

“Because the Doctor thought he could help, thought maybe it was worth it to find a good Dalek,” and maybe just for the hell of it she added silently. “That wasn’t the worst time though. That first time I thought I might die. The second time I thought he would,” Clara sat up and got two glasses and a bottle of wine from the picnic basket and Ashildr looked questioningly at her, “I was tricked, tricked into the casing of a Dalek. Believe me that was much worse,” she shuddered at the memory. The claustrophobia, the smell of rot and devastation, the endless whirring and pulsing, being out of control and helpless, on the verge of killing her best friend. She took hold of the neck of wine bottle and forcefully pierced the cork with the corkscrew. “I never want to feel like that again,” she said, punctuating each word with a twist. She tugged out the cork and held it in her hand for a moment, “he got me out though.”

“Sounds to me like he was always getting you nearly killed. He’s reckless and arrogant.” 

“Yeah, he can be, but he’s kind, and tender, and tries really hard to be a good man too,” as she poured the wine she sees him, black coat, loose grey curls, blue eyes, playing the song of the universe with his fingertips, a magician with an electric guitar. “He always had my back, always, from the first moment to the last,” she handed Ashildr a drink but left her own untouched, lay back again, face to the sky.

“You loved each other, didn’t you. You and the Doctor,” Clara turned her head to Ashildr, put a hand over her eyes against the glare and wondered whether to answer this or not.

“Yes, very deeply” she said finally and turned back to the sky.

“But you weren’t lovers,” Clara was not sure if this was an impertinent question, idle curiosity, or merely a statement. If her heart was beating it would thump a merry rhythm now. She continued to stare at the sky and for a long time silence filled the space between the blue grass and the rainbow.

“Friends, just friends,” she said at last. Sometimes it felt as if someone was scripting their lives, pushing them together then keeping them apart, always playing with reasons not be together and bad timing. She sat up and took a sip of her wine, a mellow red with hints of cherry and clove. Ashildr had another question and waved her hand expansively at the sky.

“What is Belshazzar’s Eternal Rainbow? How does it always stay there?”

“I don’t know, he did tell me, but he was talking Doctory and I think I zoned out.”

“Ah,” said Ashildr, as if she had caught Clara in a little deception, “you came here together.” 

“Yeah, we did, quite close to the end,” it was right after that business with the Zygons, “we drank this wine actually, a vintage year from the Tantalus Cluster he said,” she held up a glass to Ashildr, and to the memory; a small clink of glass on glass rang in the air for a moment. She could still picture that day quite clearly: she and the Doctor stretched on a blanket in a friendly ‘T’, her head on his chest; listening to his voice and to his hearts drum their fourfold rhythm; both of them looking up at the endless rainbow. 

“Clara,” rolling her name to the sky and sweeping his hand the full length of the rainbow, “there’s so many things I haven’t shown you yet,” he said as he ghosted his hand across her hair. 

“I think he knew a storm was coming,” said Clara, leaned in closer to Ashildr, to confide over the top of her wine glass, “that day I wished we could step right through that rainbow into an alternate universe, where rules, and reasons, and bad timing never get in the way,” Ashildr laughed kindly. 

“That universe sounds lovely Clara, but sadly, we are forced to live in this one.”

“Yes we are,” Clara swirled her wine around in the glass, and took a deeper sip, “but I’ll never be sorry, not for a single minute, that I met him.” Ashildr and Clara sat together for a long time that day, enjoyed the wine, and the bread, and one of the wonders of the universe painted in a glorious arc over their heads.

Belshazzar’s Eternal Rainbow; never alters, never changes, never fades, and like that rainbow, some stories are eternal too.

**Author's Note:**

> I have tried to build a visual here as well as reflect on character and relationships. Comments good, bad or indifferent much appreciated!
> 
> I don't have a beta reader, and don't know how to get one, so if anyone is interested in a bit of mutual beta'ing (if that's even a word!) please let me know.


End file.
